NDK

Native Development Kit Guidelines

This document serves as a brief introduction to the NDK, what should go in it, what shouldn't, and how the information is organized at the file level, as well as how the syntax and formatting is done at the source level.

What is the NDK?

The NDK, or Native Development Kit, is the brainchild of Alex Ionescu, allowing Windows and ReactOS developers alike to have access to a wealth of undocumented kernel and native structures and function prototypes.

Without the NDK, Windows developers are forced to define their own "undoct.h" headers in which they copy/paste information found online, which may or may not be valid and updated. For native types, this is even harder, as sometimes the information is present in the DDK or IFS, but cannot be used in a user-mode application, nor can it be copy-pasted. The developer must re-write all the definitions he needs.

Without the NDK, ReactOS developers are forced to use a system of up to 3 kinds of duplicated headers (sometimes four) containing identical, similar, or worse, different information. Differences between these headers create compile-time problems, and fixing one header set without updating the other usually causes brekage in applications compiled with "W32API" headers versus applications compiled with "ddk" headers vesus applications compiled with "ntos" headers.

The NDK provides a unified header set for development of:

• User mode applications which use native functions (include windows.h and the user-mode NDK)
• Native applications (include the user-mode NDK)
• Kernel-mode drivers which use undocumented kernel functions (include ddk and/or ifs and kernel-mode NDK)

What goes in the NDK?

• Todo.
• Todo.
  • Todo.
  • Todo.
• Todo.

What should not go in the NDK?

• Todo.
• Todo.
• Todo

How is the NDK organized?

Todo.

What is the formatting syntax in the NDK?

Todo. (There's a proposal at Coding_Style and a corresponding discussion Talk:Coding_Style